Causing mayhem - cognitive conflict

In senior Physics, at least, I rarely have trouble causing cognitive conflict. My students are in an almost perpetual state of cognitive conflict. They barely have a few moments of blissful security before I start asking questions that get them to look at how their existing understanding is too simple and full of misunderstandings.

In junior Science, however, getting students to that point of cognitive conflict can be difficult to achieve. There is nothing so disheartening as discovering that your students have absorbed all the new learning, but not jettisoned all their old beliefs. Students are capable of holding seven contradictory thoughts before breakfast, let alone their contradictory thoughts about the structure of plastics.

I have been working hard to get students to recognise that they are in cognitive conflict, not just be in cognitive conflict, do a bit of mental gymnastics, and assimilate the contradictions into a dual view of the world.

This isn't new, I know, but I have just come across it again recently. When I am working with students at a high level - getting students to predict, or make generalisations, or evaluate ideas - then students can't help but change ideas. It's something to do with the extended abstract thinking, at that top level of SOLO taxonomy, that makes contradictions untenable.

I use SOLO taxonomy in a relatively limited way in my junior classes. They are definitely embedded in the learning outcomes, and our whole department is working on increasing metacognition in our students. Now that I've thought about this link between cognitive conflict, high level thinking on the SOLO taxonomy and real change in thinking, I am going to have to think more about how to extend this.

Reflection! Fun times.

Learning at school

Okay, so I've only been here since just before 9am this morning, but I'm still excited and think I thought be blogging just a little bit. Twitter is all awesome and stupendous but sometimes 140 characters just doesn't cut it.

I'm in a session on the SOLO taxonomy and we're rattling around a bit in this huge room. I think people are still digesting the keynote. Now, I'm pretty excited about this spotlight because I'm all about the learning outcomes. I try to have really clear signposts for learning in a lesson-by-lesson fashion and also on a longer scale. But many of my longer term goals are a little... well, punk, in the sense that I value a bit of a rough and ready, diy, homegrown kind of learning. Sometimes, I don't talk about them too much. It makes people nervous.

But I am enjoying the slow unfolding of the SOLO taxonomy. What I'm seeing so far is an interesting, deeper take on the rather dirty version of learning I use: "I know nothing", "I know something", "I know many things", "I can do things with the things I know" and "I can create and explain new things with the things I know".

You know, I'm thinking more about self-assessment matrices and how our department uses them. I think we need to work more on developing what those last two criteria look like for students. In particular - and I know this will go down like a lead balloon at my school - we need to focus on what application and creativity looks like for girls in subjects that are traditionally considered to be boys' subjects. I know I am influenced by being a physics teacher, but it is definitely a concern for me.

Right. More thinking. More listening. More link making and integrating.

(More dirty outcomes? You bet)